Witness Everything
by the bonesinger of yme-loc
Summary: He witnesses. Alone on the ruined surface of Calth, he walks the bones of dead cities and the ashes of the Imperial Truth, and considers his place within it all. [Following a Legionnaire, set during the betrayal at Calth and afterward]
1. Blinded

He was blind - and he was pretty sure it was permanent. He'd had the misfortune of looking up when the sky fell in and the galaxy went mad: that is, when the heavens lit with light so blinding it seared his retinas raw. He heard from others, those around him, those who weren't blinded, that it seemed to _strobe_ , to flash, waver and strengthen. Some of those around him were soldiers, and they said it meant there was more than one explosion.

None of them had answers as to _what_ was exploding, so bright, so close, and what it meant.

None of them needed answers to the last question. What it _meant_ was that everything was upside down, and when the metal rain started, it meant that what started as standard busy day for the Calth muster had become a nightmare.

He struggled through the insanity that descended, hearing everything that happened. Hearing the distant percussion of gunfire, wondering who was shooting at whom, asking, asking, asking the supply clerk from Numinus who was helping - dragging him, really - along.

She didn't know. She didn't know. All the radios were dead silent, and the detachments of the Army, they didn't know anything either. All she knew, she kept repeating, was that a _fugging starship_ fell out of the sky onto Numinus. Kept saying it. He didn't see it. Hadn't seen it. Couldn't see it. But he felt it, even though Numinus was fifty miles away, he felt it when the ground leapt up and knocked them all flat, when his gut clenched and churned at the overpressure and the concussion wave of the impact slammed them a dozen feet sideways.

He didn't see it, but oh he believed it.

* * *

Updated because I called the Army the Guard. Woops.


	2. Hiding from Angels

The clerk was dead. She died yesterday, and her blood was still on him.

The worst part is he knew how she died. He heard it, and felt it. He heard the sound - the double bite explosion. He heard it, the low-bass cough of _Astartes_ guns. He felt the blast bowl him over as it ripped the clerk apart from the inside out.

It was the worst part because a Space Marine killed her. It was the worst part because he lay there, covered in her blood, pricked by splinters of her bones, the nameless clerk who only spoke encouragement to a blind old man, who led him away from danger, who kept talking, kept him company, and had to hold his breath. And lie still, still as death.

It was the worst because he heard the Space Marine walk closer, ceramite-on-concrete rasping and heavy. It was the worst because he knew without a shred of doubt that there was a bolt in that boltgun with his name on it, and only total silence could save him.

It was the worst because he was hiding from one of the Emperor's Angels.


	3. Calth was Hope

It was the Word Bearers. Had to be. He was curled in a fetal ball next to the ragged stump of a wall. He hadn't tried to move far from where the clerk had died. He couldn't see. His hands were raw just from feeling his way here, to the vague shelter from the harsh winds and choking debris that gusted through the air. The ground was coated in shards of glass, fragments of metal, all kinds of deadly debris. He was going to die here, he knew. Die of hunger, or dehydration, or some other fugging Word Bearer would show up and turn him inside out.

It had to be the Word Bearers. The Ultramarines - it was inconceivable. It couldn't be. Why would it? Why would they destroy Calth? Calth was a jewel. Calth was hope; Calth was a symbol to the whole Five Hundred Worlds. It couldn't be the Ultramarines.

It had to be the Word Bearers. The clerk was saying so. They hadn't seen many people in their careful flight. Those they had had been just as confused and terrified of the artillery that spoke on the horizon, of the nonstop gunfire that seemed to be everywhere at once, echoing in the strange atmospherics. She had a friend, who knew a guy who was in the Army, who was friends with an Ultramarines Sergeant. Apparently there was some bad blood between the Word Bearers and the Ultramarines. Old wounds. Old arguments. She said this campaign, here, at Calth, was supposed to heal them.

Instead it was looking like the Word Bearers decided to just kill everyone.

He shivered, stomach growling. It felt almost wrong to feel hungry, just now. Like it was somehow disrespectful. The universe was flipped upside down, the sons of the Emperor at each other's throats. Inconceivable. Calth was burning. He shouldn't be, couldn't be, hungry at a time like this. This was an awesome event, in the old, original meaning. Awesome - terrible, great and momentous and damning.

He hugged his aching hands tighter to his sides, arms crossed across his chest. The winds were still howling, shrieking through the shattered buildings on all sides. The wall at his back blocked the worst of it, but still some worked through. He was used to it by now.

Wasn't ever how he thought he'd die though. When he retired, and made his way here, to Calth, he figured his chances of dying in battle were pretty much zero. Out here, in the heady expansion of Ultramar, it was beyond safe. Almost as safe as Terra, he reckoned. And he'd had a family here, started one, and lived a long time. Been happy, with his quiet life, and quiet love, and nice neighbors. Watching the galaxy spin on, listening to the newswire every night, hearing about the glories of the Crusade marching on. Proud to have been a part, and proud to have survived and gotten out.

And here he was, going to die alone and blind, on _Calth_.


	4. I don't know who the enemy is

He jolted awake, adrenaline spiking through tired veins. He knew that sound. The sound of heavy tread, ceramite on concrete, crushing debris to dust.

Oddly, though, he didn't even feel afraid. Just exhausted and angry. Angry at the world, angry at the Word Bearers, even a little angry at the Ultramarines. Angry that they didn't save Calth.

Angry that he didn't try to make it home.

The footsteps got louder and closer and he didn't try to move. He would barely get anywhere, and would just die like a panicked dog. No, he'd face it, and hope it was quick. At least the clerk, as messy as it was, probably was instant. She wouldn't have felt any pain. The footsteps stopped, and he could _feel_ the Space Marine in front of him. He bit back tears, feeling the animal panic starting to clutch at his chest. Fug and damn, but he couldn't even _see_ the marine, and still it was terrifying. But he wouldn't cry. He wouldn't beg. He wouldn't plead.

He wouldn't give these world-killers - these butchers! - the satisfaction.

"Are you alive, mortal?" The voice was deep, a grumble, tinged harsh with static.

Even if he wanted to answer, he couldn't. The air was stolen from his lungs.

There was a creak of ceramite, and a whine of motors. The Space Marine spoke again, voice closer this time. Crouching, probably.

"You are." He tensed, waiting for it. Would he be shot? Crushed? ...stepped on?

A metal pressure on his shoulder, shockingly light, finally blew apart his resistance. He jolted, shied away, gasped in terror, felt tears come on withered cheeks.

"I am not your enemy." The Marine said, voice as deep, as huge as the world itself, so close he must have been. The pressure increased, but not painfully...was it...was it a _reassurance?_

"I don't even know who the enemy is-" the blinded old man gasped out, voice wheezing, barely audible, before he fainted.


	5. A Walk in the Park

Never has a walk in a park been so deadly. It is with a wry sense of humor, a sort of grave-wit more common among his more macabre cousins that he reflects on this. It is also, honestly speaking, not entirely untrue or exaggerated. The ground is littered with unexploded munitions and ordnance: from charges for lascarbines, spare bolt rounds, and even, from what he can tell, entire shells intended for the guns of superheavy tanks. They lie there, amidst the rubble, utterly pristine save for faint charring and a light coating of ash. The ash, though, coats everything.

Finger-length rounds clatter as he walks, kicked aside without care and without heed. The trees in the park are torched skeletons, nothing more than flash-burned husks that rip at the sky with tangled limbs. They are ephemerally fragile, nothing more than petrified char held together by the relative calm of the weather. He had brushed by one earlier, and now his armor was coated in the dull gray ash after the entire tree, all forty feet of it, disintegrated in an instant. Apart from a few streaks allowing the base color to shine through, only brushed away by the bracing of his gauntlets as he knelt, he hasn't given the coating a second thought. There is no one alive here anyway, no one to challenge him, no one to call friend or foe to a giant in shrouded grey ceramite. He is alone here, in every conceivable meaning of the word.

A shell more at home in the breech of a Baneblade looms next to him as he walks, and he drags a gauntleted hand along it, leaving parallel trails through the dusting of ash. His armor is constantly pinging rad-alarms, tiny alerts and runes blinking up within his visor and just as quickly being blinked away. Already he can feel the heat in his body as his transhuman metabolism struggled to undo the damages the sun is wreaking on him.

The sun. It looms above, bloated and wrathful, a blue star with none of the warmth it should give. It sears down, howling and enraged, hammering the planet with inconceivable doses of every possible form of exotic particle, and some humans have never named. Looking up at it, feeling the baleful heat on his cheeks, be it imagined or real, he cannot shake the sensation the star is angry with him. Angry with anyone who dares show their face, angry at the universe for murdering it far, far before its allotted time. Murderer or innocent, they were all blamed in the unflinching judgment of Veridia.

It is the Word Bearers, though, that have its stellar blood on their hands. They have killed it, as surely as they have every other living thing that crossed their paths. He had been there, when the opening shots were fired. When the Ultramarines, arrayed into neat ranks, as quick to react as ever, marched down the hill. A Captain led them, hand raised in greeting. A hand blown off by the first act of treason. It was, in all, a very metaphorical engagement.

He had been there, when the titans loomed overhead, hooting and blaring their cacophonous joy, stomping the ground to paste as the sky burned. He had been there, through the pursuit through the forests and flaming fields, as every last son of Guilliman was cut down. He had hid in the mud, covered in gore not his own, as still as the dead, and watched the marching line of Word Bearers sweep past.

Later, he had seen a starship fall from the sky. It was distant, and fell behind the horizon, but he had seen it. He stood there, transfixed, for the entire descent. There wasn't much else to do – with the rain of orbital debris unstoppable and everywhere, even trying to run or dodge was hilariously impractical. He would either be crushed underneath, say, a shadowsword, or his head opened by a simple nut or bolt accelerated to absurd speeds by reentry. Or he wouldn't. So he hadn't feared, and instead took the time to _witness_.

It is becoming an obsession of his. He is hale enough of mind to understand that. To appreciate it. He does not, however, stop. He witnesses a lot.

Some might call him a traitor. Some might call him craven.

He honestly does not have the slightest concern for that, because no one is left alive to call him anything.

So he witnesses. He crouches amongst debris, and watches as Word Bearers ritually slaughter an entire regiment of Army. It is a ludicrously precise operation. The soldiers have no weapons – most had been turned out of their tents and shelters where they had been waiting for embarkation when the first light of betrayal lit the skies, and had been running ever since. Maybe half a hundred in the regiment is armed. Maybe.

And what arms they have spanked and reflected off the armor of the Astartes. It is mortal weaponry for mortal wars, not even close to being enough to fell transhuman soldiers. Especially ones as… _resilient_ …as the Word Bearers are becoming. It is two squads of the crimson giants, and they simply wade through, unhurried strides long enough to keep pace with the exhausted, running mass of humanity. He watches as they pluck up a soldier, slit his or her unfortunate throat, and toss them aside like rubbish. He watches and watches and watches, until the last one was dead, and the ground was literally soaked in red. There is nothing he could've done here, so he watches. Two squads of Legionares, and he was alone, and very low on bolter ammunition.

He witnesses.

On another day, he watches hundreds of Word Bearers die. Now that was a spectacle. They are well and truly routed, absolutely crushed by combined Ultramarine formations and superheavy assets. Shadowswords incinerate entire squads. Baneblades hurl rounds that rip up great volcanoes of earth. There is even a titan. It lingers far to the back, heavily damaged; missing one arm, but still it provides fire support.

He thinks he sees perhaps four, maybe five Ultramarines fall over the entire duration of the engagement. All that is left was a scrapyard of shattered crimson armor, burnt black. He rearms that day, though, taking his fill of ammunition and even a chainsword from the dead. They don't need it. He does.

Sometimes, he wonders why he hasn't sought out any of the survivor underground. He can probably do more there, make something useful of himself. There is no living here, above the ground, but below he has heard the war rages on. The XIII, even faced with oblivion, fight on against the Bearers of the Word.

Instead, he wanders. And witnesses. And when his body cannot take more, he finds shelter, and rests, and recovers. And does this again.


	6. Transhuman Dread

He finds the man on the third day after the betrayal. He is an old man, ravaged, battered and, when he gets close enough to tell, blinded. The man is, remarkably, alive. He is gathered into a corner, huddled against an interior wall of a starscraper. It's all those layers of permacrete and what-have-you that has kept him alive. Not nearly enough coverage to keep the gaze of Veridia from him, but he's situated enough that only the earliest and latest rays of the sun can touch him. He is burned as such, in a strange progression of raw stripes.

But, the man is alive.

So he walks over.

The man can tell he is approaching. As old as he is, as wounded; he is still cognizant. That is impressive. The man makes a bold face of it, clearly prepared for his end.

The bold face shatters when he asks him if he is alive. It is rhetorical, of course. He can see him breathing. He can smell him, the animal scent of injuries going bad. His visor scans tell him as much.

But he asks to gauge the man. The man breaks, quivering and unable to catch his breath.

Transhuman fear, they call it.

So he crouches in front of the skeleton of a human being, and places one enormous hand on his shoulder, and squeezes as lightly as physically possible. He is trying to be reassuring. He doesn't exactly know how to be – he's not exactly used to interacting with baseline humans. Not like this.

The man passes out, but not after uttering a few words.

"I don't even know who the enemy is."

He ponders the meaning in those words as he carries the mortal with him, cradled in enormous arms with delicate care. Veridia has already sunk for the night, leaving this side of Calth in the momentary reprieve of its wrath.

He has a shelter, not far from where this man was. Enough food, drinkable water. Some medicines. He has been scavenging as he wanders, as he witnesses. It's not really a conscious decision. He just does. Perhaps it's some old conditioning. The Legionnaire part of him recognizing his status: alone on a hostile world where pretty much anything can kill him, little hope for extraction.

So he stockpiles. There's a lot out there, if one keeps his eyes open. A lot of ships, a lot of depots went up in orbit. Very low orbit. Most burned up in the atmosphere, but it's not just looting these wreckages, it's all the others. The Calth muster was the preparation for two entire Legions and their mortal armies to go to war. That is, on any day, an unprecedented amount of material in one place.

It's a testament to the Ultramarines that despite the Word Bearers literally putting every ounce of effort into it, there is literally too much supply and infrastructure to destroy. That's a thought, and it almost forces a smile.

Perhaps the Word Bearers can be defeated by logistics.


	7. Simpler is Better

The man wakes up after a few hours, rubbing his eyes and trying to sit up. It's interesting to note - even blind, there's still the human instinct to rub one's eyes after awakening.

The man is confused, and understandably so.

"I don't even know who the enemy is."

Likely, he was blinded by the _Campanile_ 's mad dash of destruction through the Calth anchorage. Which means he was blinded at the very start of the betrayal. It's quite likely no one ever told him what was going on. Or they all died before they could.

A whole world of the dead, and who survives? A fragile old man.

The universe was a strange place.

The man calls out. Timid. Afraid.

He answers, his words clipped and to the point. Repeats what he said when they met. "I am not your enemy."

"Then who is?" He thinks it over, mulling it.

"The Word Bearers." It's honestly far too simple of an answer for loaded a question, but when, functionally speaking, literally _everything_ could be considered this man's enemy, sometimes simpler is better. The old man shudders, and mutters under his breath. He likely thinks that it will not be overhead. He forgets he is in the same room as an Astartes.

"Then it is the grudge with the Ultramarines."

That too is a gross oversimplification.

But again, sometimes simpler is better.

The old man's name is Amerand.


	8. So Ephemeral

Somehow, without knowing it, the old man takes over his shelter. Amerand hobbles around, clacking his makeshift cane off of everything, and generally puttering around trying to feel useful. He responds well to the radiation medication, though that's nothing more than a delaying thing. But considering how old the man looks, his life expectancy was probably measured in the single digits before all this anyway. Not much to knock off, there.

It seems a bit callous to think of it that way, but he can't not. Mortals. They're so...ephemeral. Brief. Quick. He had known a General, a fantastic officer, beloved by his men. Respected even by some of the Legion he served with.

Years later, he had actually, in a moment of galactic serendipity, run into the general's great-granddaughter. Her illustrious ancestor having died some four decades previous. It all seemed so short to him. Despite all that - he remembers what it's like to walk the streets. To walk side by side with his brothers, through a thronging crowd of humanity, mortals all, brief and short lived and all so vibrantly alive. It was those times he was reminded that he was more than an implement of war to end traitors, end xenos, purge those the stood against the Emperor. That the Crusade was meant to build, too.

Amerand organized things. Packed medicae equipment away in boxes. Labelled them with scraps of paper with handwriting still decently legible despite his blindness. Packed rations away similarly. Collected all the cans and barrels of water into one corner. Counted them up and wrote that down too. Even munitions. He returned once from wandering and found every single one of the bolt shells he'd scavenged sitting, points up, in neat rows on an fold-out table. Like an army of brass men.

How many there were was written down too.

Baffled by all this, he asks Amerand why he bothers writing anything down.

Amerand laughs, a wheeze, and says that just because _he_ is blind didn't mean everyone is. 'You aren't, my lord.' Those exact words.

Amerand is doing this for him. A wizened old man, half dead, is organizing supplies for the convenience of a geneforged Legionnaire.

He isn't quite sure what to make of that.


	9. Flesh and Blood and Potential

He is striding the ash flats. Veridia burns down around him, and his suit alarms have long since burned out. He gauges exposure by the prickling of his skin within its shell of ceramite, and decades of apothecary training. He needs the burn: the searing blue-white heat and cleansing fires that gambol about him.

He is considering divinity.

The Emperor, beloved by all, teaches that there are no gods and first and foremost among those not-a-gods is He; the shining, radiant beacon of hope to all mankind.

He teaches this with sword and raised fist, with fire from the heavens and the tears of his sons.

He teaches this and in so instructing, drives his most devoted children to the ends of the universe.

And yet, He might not be wrong to do so.

He teaches the cosmos are a cold, unfeeling and logical place. That there is nothing hiding behind the stars, that the deep black is simply the absence of light. His light.

In this, He is wrong.

In this, he can be certain. Because he has seen the faces in the sky and they have chewed his brothers up and spat them out. He has seen them, because his father has bent the knee and offered all he is in wretched payment. He has seen them, because Calth is dead and the dead whisper to him as he treads their bones.

He remembers Monarchia. He remembers a Legion kneeling in the drifting ash of the Perfect City, not so different from his surroundings now. They kneels, not by choice, but by imperial fiat. He watches a devoted son rage and weep and the Emperor turn away.

He can feel, across the distance, faith breaking. Loyalty snapping. The bond between father and son frayed unto nothing in that bare, windswept plain, while a hundred thousand Legionnaires watched. It was the worst thing he had felt in his long life, and he has seen many things since then.

He has considered the Bearers of the Word. They have failed. They had done all they could to glorify the Emperor, beloved by all, in what they thought was the only way that was right. In the way that Lorgar of Colchis, the Urizen, taught them.

And they were wrong. Lorgar was wrong.

The Emperor was right.

When they returned to their ships, and left the grave of the Perfect City behind, he retired to the apothecarion and went about his duties, meditating-in-action. He remembers the gene-seed banks. All waiting for eventual implantation into neophytes, to grow and gestate into the Astartes organs that would usher in a new blood to the Legion. He watched them in the juvenating gel, all tangled and torn flesh and lumps of meat. There was no Word Bearer about them, no Ultramarine. The two legions demonstrated to be such polar opposites down in the ash and yet there is no mark of either on the gestating organs.

He had seen the gene-seeds of a half dozen legions as he tore them from the dying flesh for preservation. Throughout the crusade, Legions often alloyed together companies, and his oaths as an apothecary led him to preserve life whenever and wherever he could. If a Legionnaire fell; be he Luna Wolf, Thousand Son, Ultramarine or Word Bearer, it was _his_ job to make safe their legacy. And in all their gene-seed he saw no words or aspect that hinted at the character of their legion.

It was simply meat, quiescent and ready, full of potential to be unlocked.

Potential. Meat, blood and potential. Is that was the Emperor saw when he looked at mankind? When he looked at his sons, the Primarchs, and the legions made from their flesh? Meat, blood and potential?

He had watched the thin spirals of blood that burbled from the ragged edges of the gene-seed, leaving helixes in the gel. We are all blood and flesh, waiting until forged by the world and by circumstance. And what had the Word Bearers forge, in Lorgar's name? Worlds made compliant and praying en masse to the Emperor. Worlds of absolute faith and religion, raised high with every throat exulting the Emperor beyond all.

Doing exactly what the Emperor, beloved by all, teaches _not_ to do.

How could they have been so wrong?

He strides the ash plains, beneath the glaring eye of Veridia. It burns all around him, but he burns from within.

We are his children, and his grandchildren. Who are we to decide what is right and what is wrong? He sees in all of us meat and blood and potential and he shapes us to defend mankind, and we repay our birth with distrust and disobedience.

He understands now. The Emperor is a god. He is divine, beyond all things, and he understands the terror weight of it. He is a god that does not wish to be because he has seen all that gods can do. Calth is dead because gods demand worship. A Legion is twisted beyond recognition and is murdering itself because gods yearn for it. The Emperor is a god and he does not want to be, but divinity cannot be rejected.

So the Emperor must pretend to be otherwise, for all time, because he understands as no other the danger it presents.

He falls to his knees in the dust, gathering up handfuls and letting it slide through armored fingers. Grey, just as their armor once was. Grey as the future of the galaxy, ash and dust settling about the once-golden future. He made us all we are and we repay him with terror.

The Emperor never turned from us.

We turned from him.

God, my god, why have we forsaken you?


	10. To Witness Everything

He is three days from his shelter. Using basements, underground railways and more, he is ranging farther and longer. Still, he does not know why. This part of Calth is dead. Amerand confirms it - as far as the old man knows, there's no arcologies near here. The underground labyrinths where the war continues don't have a presence here.

Maybe it's basic restlessness. That after two centuries of war, he can't _not_ do something, even if it's get his armor slowly worn down by a dead sun.

Maybe it's hopefulness. Maybe someone is alive out here. Amerand was. Is.

Maybe he just wants to witness everything. See every last bit of what was done to Calth. Leave no bone unseen. No ruin unchecked. No tragedy forgotten.

He is three days from his shelter, and he is in a dilemma.

Three days, distance wise, is a very different number between Legionnaires and mortals. Three days for him is very likely weeks for mortals. Three days for him counts crossing expanses at night or in favorable conditions that a mortal would be caught out in and fried.

This is a dilemma, because he is standing at the top of a flight of stairs, leading down into a commissary basement, and there are six survivors staring up at him in shock.


	11. Survivors of the Betrayal

They don't talk much, which is good, because he doesn't say much.

But they follow him. He walks the basement, taking in everything at a glance. Copious amounts of food, both preserved, perishable, packaged and more. They've barely made a dent in it. Water is less optimal. There's a spigot that still runs, and they've filled a number of buckets and containers with it, before, as they said when he asked, it started to taste 'wrong'. Likely contaminated like everything else. So they have food, but the water reserves are drying up, quite literally.

At his shelter, he has weeks' worth of water. A train carrying a great deal of it for reactors had derailed northwards, and a fair number of the barrels had survived. They were all military grade containers, more than capable of withstanding Veridia's glare before he found them.

The issue then was that that water was three days, by his pace, away. And there was not enough ration reserves for this many survivors, especially with such a plentiful amount here.

A water treatment apparatus. Something like that. One of those devices mortals used to filter their water. He'd only heard of them; in the Legion, you could drink mostly anything if need be. But the mortal auxiliaries, they always hauled those recyclers or filters around with them.

One of those would solve this whole problem, if that spigot kept running like it was. Contamination could be undone, and this group could stay here, and he could forget about them.

Well. He could still leave and forget about them. It is six ragged humans, they are basically nothing in the face of it all.

The thought dies almost as soon as it occurs. No. They are six survivors of the betrayal, as much as he is.


End file.
